Connectors – The 14% Club

Welcome to the 14% club

14 percent isn’t a lot. If you got 14% on an exam, well, you failed. Straight up. Tariffs at 14%? That would be a luxury, barely a ripple. Not worth noticing. Hitting 0.140? You’d be lucky if all they do is bounce you down to single-A ball. 14% win rate? Last place. Nobody wants 14% success.

Unfortunately, when we connect applications to our governance platform of choice (I’m a SailPoint groupie, but there are other good ones out there too), 14% is the average. Which means most of us are failing at getting our governance solutions connected to the applications we need to govern.

And this is actually worse than it sounds, because it’s not 14% of all applications the company uses. That would be bad enough. No, it’s actually fourteen percent of the applications identified as needing governance, which for many organizations is a much smaller list. These are all applications prioritized as being necessary, and using the best connection technologies in the world to date we’re delivering on average 14% success.

So as an industry, we’re failing. Badly.

Why is it so bad?

Well, there are a multitude of reasons, but basically, apps are difficult.

Look, developing applications is hard work. There are a lot of demands on the team from customers, prospects, managers, the marketing team, the CEO, and of course the devs themselves. They’ve got to build enough new features that their app stays ahead of the competition, the features have bugs that need fixing, features promised to customers need to be delivered, it’s a lot. And none of that – or at least very little of it – is “deliver easy to use secure APIs that allow me to remotely govern your app”

Governance platforms are also not connectivity platforms. They’ve been using the same connector tech since they started more or less.Since changing how you build connectors could easily mean every customer starting over again (and as you know, we’re only at 14% already. Back to 0% is a non starter). It’s like changing the bedrock that your house is built on, without it falling down. Not simple. Also, connector tech is built in a way that makes governance easy, since that’s the governance product’s job, and not built to make creating a connector easy. That makes developing connectors a challenging prospect.

So, connectors are expensive to make. They take expensive expertise, constant maintenance, and a rigorous process to ensure they’re delivered correctly. Many applications don’t have an easy way to connect or any way to connect programmatically at all, so the last resort of RPA and flat files becomes the norm. And any company doing that for more than a handful of key applications is inviting pain with a manual process that requires human hands to do computer work. It’s bad all around.

Solution

So, how do you get connected? As an industry, can we even achieve a passing grade?

Well, that’s exactly what we’re working on here at READI. Let’s talk about some of the things we see as critical to connection success.

First, you need to be able to give a wide range of ways of getting at application data. So, when inevitably you run into apps without good APIs (or the APIs are behind a debilitating pay wall), you have options. Whether it’s looking at the registry, or custom file formats, or database tables, or even throwing up a command line processor automatically to interrogate the target. Whatever you can do to get at these apps, do it.

Second, the majority of connectors need to be writable by folks without a comp sci degree. Or, preferably, any coding trading at all. For us this is the “can my mother-in-law, with the help of CoPilot or ChatGPT, build a connector?”. If the answer isn’t yes, try again. We should be able to get summer students to build these.

Third, the majority of connectors have to be buildable in hours and not weeks. A couple of days at most. This would allow us to build 10 connectors for every 1 we build today, and that speed is critical to making 14% into 100%.

Lastly, and most ambitious, we’d like to have a solution that can build connectors for us. Nothing to announce here yet – yet! – but check here often. Or reach out to the team for a demo of the next generation of connectors. When you can connect an app just by jotting down a few notes on what steps you need to take, we’ll be in business. Stay tuned.

All in all, if we expect governance to deliver on its objectives, we need to pass the connector test. Most of us are a long way from that – we’d need to more than triple the size of our current connector list to pass – but thanks to READI we’ve now got some hope.